Press for Startups: 10 tips | Hacker News Reader

Press for Startups: 10 tips

david.weebly.com

49 pointsdrusenko8 comments

nice advice. Found the point about tuesday-thursday and how early to tell press most interesting.

David, obviously weebly has received a lot of good/big coverage, how much of it was through your direct affect (i.e contacting the reporter) and how much through serendipitous circumstances?

- Newsweek was through YC generally, but not all companies in the round got a mention in the article, so it certainly had some to do with our effort.

- Time reporter contacted us initially, but she sent out the same email to a lot of startups. The real effort was in (first) just getting back to her, and (second) properly selling the start-up and vision. She made the original email sound as if it wasn't a big article at all.

- NBC, BBC were serendipitous, but most likely as a result of our growing user base (more people out there who knew about us/recommended us).

- The rest were all as a result of us contacting reporters (TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, Mashable, etc)

Put together a short list of bloggers that are appropriate for your product!

I think bloggers and press can help when you have a niche consumer product (like a user generated travel website) but you need to get your name in the relevant (i.e. travel) news/blogs.

What I don't think works for a general consumer site (site that is not necessarily geared towards techies) is spending a lot of time trying to get covered by techcrunch because your time could be better spent targetting more relevant media (yes techcrunch readers travel but not all travelers are techies).

Great article.

I'd add a reference article: http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/11/why-...

In short, think hard about whether there are ways you can spend your time in a way the KEEPS GIVING you traffic/attention (SEO / viral). In the world of startups, if you are doing something it is invariably at the expense of something else.

With all due respect to Andrew Chen, he's wrong. He makes a good point -- viral traffic is the best kind -- but there is definite use to press traffic as well. All of our growth has been based on press. I'm planning on writing a blog post in a few days (need to get some work done now!) that shows a graph of our growth and talks about how press has impacted us.

Heh-- I'm not saying press/bloggers aren't important,,, but that Andrew's point is as important (or more). The number of startups focusing on getting onto TechCrunch far outnumbers the number that are focusing on their SEO/viral strategy.

My last job was at a funded startup that spent boatloads on PR and got lots of press (TV, newspapers, blogs). Just about every time there was a great spike... Followed be traffic dropping back to "normal" levels.

From what I've seen of PR, it's not very effective, especially not for the $/results ratio. The point of Andrew Chen's article is indeed good -- viral growth, if you can achieve it, is awesome. But press is far from useless.

I have no idea what the product did at the last startup you worked at. A lot of times companies think pounding the press will bring them success, which is, again, not true (a shitty product that gets press won't go anywhere). However, a good product that receives press should settle down at more signups/day than before the coverage. Enough exposure, and a good product should eventually take off: people keep telling people about products they recommend, slowly, over time. You eventually build up a base of enough people that are recommending you that you really start to grow.

If it doesn't, I'd take a hard look at the product.

As another data point, I've seen the exact same thing. About 8 years back, I worked at a funded startup that got tons of press, because we were all teenagers and it was the height of the dot-com boom. We got a spike everytime we were mentioned, but it didn't stick, and we were actually losing regular users (they thought we'd gone all corporate, which I guess we had).

Build something worth talking about before you get people talking. In our case, we got press because of who we were and not what we'd built, and that's not sustainable.

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